The problem gnawed. Usually either the Pro or the Contra column was markedly longer or weaker than the other; in this matter they were pretty evenly matched. From a folder in his inner pocket he drew a letter, and re-read it, as he had done twice before that day.
Dear Hec:
Just a line to let you know that you are going to be asked to be one of the Revision Board in Maths this summer—to head it up, in fact. The list has not been finalized by the Deputy, but it won’t be changed now. You know what this means. You’ll be Head Examiner in Maths next year, or the year after. And that means you can have a Department job if you want it, eh? Your friends here can fix it if you put up a good show on the Revision. Remember what Churchill says; Give us the tools and we’ll finalize the commitment. So long Hec, old boy.
At any previous time in his life such a letter would have thrown Hector into a well-controlled ecstasy. Signal preferment was offered as an examiner in the provincial examination system, and the prospect of a job in the Department of Education, that Moslem Paradise of ambitious teachers! Here was his old friend, Russell McIlquham, himself a rising man with that most.desirable of all departmental benefactions, “the ear of the Deputy”, practically assuring him that it was only a matter of time before he, Hector, would revel in departmental authority with a good chance of imposing his pet schemes upon other, reluctant teachers. But as so often happens in an unsatisfactory world, this good news came at the wrong time. His cup of professional ambition was filled at a moment when he hankered after other, strange delights. What should he do? Should he act,—a course from which his common sense told him he was unlikely to derive any benefit except his own satisfaction—or should he put out his hand and pluck this plum which had ripened in his professional life? He was somewhat astonished at himself to find that he hesitated in making his choice.
He had worked his way almost to the end of his coconut chiffon pie. He ate methodically, devouring the cardboard-like crust at the back of his segment of pie (his trained eye told him that it was a reasonable, but not an exact, sixth of a pie ten inches in diameter) but leaving one last mouthful of cream and coconut, to be chomped voluptuously when the crust was done. It was as he was about to raise this tidbit to his mouth that he lifted his eyes and saw a vaguely familiar figure standing at the counter, some distance from him.
Hector had an excellent memory for names and faces. He sometimes amused his colleagues at teachers’ entertainments by reciting the nominal roll of some class which he had taught ten or twelve years before; he never hesitated over a name. He knew that this young man was Lieutenant Roger Tasset, whom he had met briefly one hour and twenty-five minutes earlier in The Shed at St Agnes’.
Tasset was talking to the waitress behind the counter. Hector could not hear what was said, but the girl leaned toward Roger, and her face was stripped of the suspicious, somewhat minatory expression which waitresses often wear when dealing with young male customers. She appeared to glow a little, and her lips parted moistly as she listened to what he said. He was, in fact, making some mention of the heavy tax on the box of cigarettes which he had bought. But to Hector’s eye the girl seemed to be responding to the easy gallantry which was plain in Roger’s figure and face, if not in his words.
Hector popped the gob of coconut cream into his mouth with unaccustomed haste, seized his black notebook and drew a line under the two columns. But instead of writing, as was his custom, the name of the victorious column in capitals under this line, he wrote instead: “There are some decisions which cannot be made on a basis of reason.”
In the glare of the lamp the small but distinct bald spot on Mrs Bridgetower’s head glowed dustily as she bent over her dish of oyster stew. It was an ugly lamp, but there was a solemnity, almost a grandeur, about its ugliness. Hanging from one of the false oak beams in the dining-room by an oxidized bronze chain which the passing of years had made even more rusty, it spread out like a canopy over the middle of the dining-table. The shade was of bronze strips, apparently held together by bronze rivets, and between the strips were pieces of glass so rough in texture, so shot with green and yellow and occasional flecks of red, that they seemed to be made of vitrified mucus. When she and the late Professor Bridgetower had built this house, before the First World War, it had been a beautiful lamp, for it accorded with the taste of the period. So did the rest of the room—the oak table and chairs which owed so much, but not perhaps enough, to William Morris; the “built-in” buffet at the end of the room, with its piece of cloudy mirror and its cabinets with leaded-glass windows, in which cups and saucers and the state china were imprisoned; the blue carpet upon the floor.
It was in the manner which had been current when her house was built that Mrs Bridgetower ordered her meals and caused them to be served. The table at which she and Solly were seated was spread with a white linen cloth; she thought, quite rightly, that people who used mats did so to save washing, and she thought it unsuitable to save in that way. She did not approve of careless, quick meals, and although she did not care greatly for food herself she coursed Solly through soup, an entree, a sweet and a savoury every night that she faced him at that table. She insisted, making a joke of it, that he wear at least a dark coat, and preferably a dark suit, to dinner. And she insisted that there be what she called “suitable conversation” with the meal. Suitable conversation involved a good many questions.
“And what have you been doing this afternoon?”
“I had to go to St Agnes’, mother, to look at the site for the play.”
“Oh, and so we are to be vouchsafed a glimpse of the gardens at St Agnes’, are we? I’m sure the Little Theatre is privileged.”
“Mr Webster is lending the upper lawn.”
“As Griselda is to play a leading role, I suppose he could not very well refuse.”
“The play was provisionally cast before he was asked for the gardens, mother.”
“That does not alter the position as much as you appear to think. Not that I care whether he lends his garden or why. He is not a man I care for greatly.”
“I didn’t know that you knew him.”
“I don’t.”
Silence. The soup gave place to a pork tenderloin. Solly wondered what to talk about. He must keep his mother away from international politics. This had been her study—no, not her study, her preoccupation and her particular source of neurosis—for as long as he could remember. Before her marriage, as an alert college girl determined to show that women could benefit from higher education every bit as much as men, Mrs Bridgetower had been greatly alarmed, in a highly intelligent and realistic manner, of course, by the Yellow Peril. The years of the War had been devoted, patriotically, to the Prussian Menace, but she had returned to her earlier love immediately afterward. The rise of totalitarianism had kept her busy during the ‘thirties, but when the Second World War began, and Japan entered it, she brought dread of the Yellow Peril to a particularly fine flowering. Since the subjugation of Japan she had developed several terrors and menaces in Latin America and South Africa, and had, of course, given the Red Menace a great deal of attention; but, by determinedly regarding Russia as an Asiatic power she was able to make the Red Menace seem no more than a magnification of the old Yellow Peril. She was growing old and set in her ways, and old perils and dreads were dearer to her than latter-day innovations.